Here’s the Artist List for the 2018 Edition of SITElines

SITE Santa Fe has announced the 23 artists who will participate in the 2018 edition of its SITElines biennial, which opens August 3. The participating artists hail from eight countries, and this year’s biennial will feature ten new commissions.

SITElines, which focuses on contemporary art of the Americas and brings together a new group of curators for each edition, was launched in 2014. The museum previously organized the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, which began in 1995; SITElines is its reimagined version. Irene Hofmann, the director of SITE Santa Fe, told ARTnews that this relatively new iteration of the biennial is “part of a larger dialogue that is pushing to alter and expand the canon.”

“In so many ways, Santa Fe—and New Mexico more broadly—is really a microcosm of the Americas, of the histories of colonialism,” she said. “This was an area of focus that we felt was really urgent and important, and one that we could really make a contribution to.”

The biennial’s 2018 edition is organized by José Luis Blondet, a curator of special projects at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Candice Hopkins, an independent curator based in Albuquerque; and Ruba Katrib, a curator at MoMA PS1 in New York. Naomi Beckwith, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, served as a curatorial adviser.

This year’s SITElines borrows its title, “Casa tomada,” from a 1946 Julio Cortázar short story that chronicles the displacement of two siblings as an unnamed presence forces them to leave their ancestral home. Hofmann said that the participating artists interpret and relate to Cortázar’s story in various ways. For instance, Ángela Bonadies and Juan José Olavarría are presenting photographs of an abandoned, unfinished high rise, which has since become a squatters’ community, in Caracas, Venezuela.

“One of the goals of this exhibition was to have a greater connection to our own very diverse community,” Hofmann said. “Through these shows, we would also be able to more authentically reflect our community, the history of this place, and how Santa Fe and New Mexico have so many important connections to the Americas.”

The full list of artists follows below. Asterisks indicate artists commissioned to create works for the biennial.